All posts filed under: Postcards from Everyday

It has been so long since I’ve been to my own website that I have had to figure out how to manage the menu. Still, that’s better than forgetting the password, which is what happened to the wedding blog I put up seven years ago to keep me sane during our wedding preps. But back to this. This blog has grown old; I have grown old. During my absence here, I buried my beloved grandmother, supported a presidential campaign, wrote countless stories, loved people, hated people, forgave people, hired someone to design a house, applied for a loan to build such house, returned to the province of my childhood, realized how different it is (or I am), finally took that trip to Europe with my 60-something parents and sisters… I’ve become such an expert at being adult that I think I have forgotten the joy of just being. Of wondering and giggling. Of dancing in the rain. Of taking chances. This photo, taken in Cesky Krumlov, reminds my heart not to grow old. It tells me to dream, and to imagine beautiful things from God. I …

I’m listening to Spotify as I work — I’m a late discoverer of this awesome app — and instead of focusing on the post offices I need to visit for a book we’re doing, I keep thinking of movies I’d like to make, stories for film that I’d like to write to match whatever is playing on my phone. Weird, because I’ve never written a script before. And yet I have all these scenes in my head. There’s one where this person’s walking, just walking, and this song by Susie Suh is playing in the background. There’s a story in my head, and oh how I’d love it if it would just put itself together while I work on projects that pay my bills. But it won’t. I’ll just have to reimagine the possibilities that come with the sense of being lost.

There are few things in this world that support our belief in the fairy tales we loved when we were little. I used to secretly dream of being in faraway castles and magical towns and royal balls and gingerbread houses — happy things that reality slowly but surely clawed out of my heart. Growing up is sad like that. Today, a rather pensive Sunday, my thoughts go back to another day in January, many years ago, when I first set foot on Carmel-by-the-Sea. It was one of the stops in our hastily planned New Year (2009) drive along the famous Highway 1 in California — just me, my then-fiance now-hubby, my cousin, and a roommate in San Francisco. It was in Carmel that I found the stuff of fairy tales again. Sadly, we didn’t get to see the inside of those quaint cottages, and this picture here is the only decent one I got of the 300-year-old San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo Mission. But I remember how everything was achingly pretty. I would give anything to go back there. #adreamisawishyourheartmakes

This time last year — that sounds so far away already — the husband and I welcomed 2014 in a quiet mountain lodge at the foot of Mt. Banahaw, a mystical place considered sacred by the locals in Quezon, about two hours south of Manila. For three days we had no Internet or cellphone signal. We spent hours and hours reading, sleeping, talking about our dreams, and picking raspberries and mushrooms. We ate locally grown vegetables and drank water sourced from a nearby spring. We did whatever people did when they had time. We would walk in the morning and in the afternoon, chatting with friendly neighbors along the way. I saw this yellow flower on one of our morning treks on January 1 and thought, “This thing’s just bursting to be!” And I suddenly couldn’t wait to live 2014, which ended six days ago, with family and money games and a lot of eating. I wonder how nature will inspire me this 2015.